What's a few million of hungry people, more or less?

The N&O ran a McClatchy story yesterday with an upbeat headline:Rise in U.S. hunger slows, but remains high. This indeed sounds like good news, or at least better than having the rate increase.

The headline for the same article on the McClatchy site is: Land of plenty? U.S. hunger rate remains stubbornly high.

Update: Reporter Tony Pugh did have it right after all: the number of people suffering from very low levels of food security was 17.4 million in 2009. The percentage for households with some level of food insecurity was 14.7%, which as I wrote earlier is the figure used in the abstract of the report itself. See table 1a in the report. Thanks to McClatchy Investigative Editor James Asher for the clarification.

New Comment: A good look at table 1a shows that the number of individuals with very low food security went up by 379,000 people from 2008 to 2009. While the report's abstract says that the rate was "essentially unchanged," that's more that all the people in any one of these cities: Honolulu, Wichita, or St. Louis.

Keep in mind that, according to Joel Berg of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, many of the figures for the number of people needing help are low because organizations have a limit to the number they can help and only report those they do help. So, if a soup kitchen was feeding 50 people lunch every day two years ago and was able to feed everyone who asked but now has a line that starts at 8 AM and turns away 100+, the reported number is still 50.

Have you actually seen a starving person in the U.S.? ask some of the mean-spirited comments on the McClatchy site. Probably not, since the nutritional-support programs have largely wiped out the pot-bellied, stick-legged look that used to be seen here. Let's thank another news agency for that. In 1968, the suffering described in CBS Reports: Hunger in America led to a Senate inquiry and $200 million more dollars for food programs.

But the current USDA report says that food-insecure households didn't have enough to eat 7 months a year and usually 1 to 7 days a month. Maybe the thought of children crying themselves to sleep because they are hungry 20 or so nights a year doesn't make you weep. In that case, please think about the long-term damage to their mental and physical development and the resulting low school and work performance.